To be somebody in life: what Julien Sorel wanted and lost

"To be somebody in life" is a phrase almost all of us have said or heard, and The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, turns it inside out. In the novel, "to become somebody" is what a letter says Julien Sorel tried to do, and it is the letter that brings him down. This article follows what Julien wanted when he wanted to be somebody, what he lost on the way, and the question the book leaves behind. It is not a guide to success: it is a reading of a novel about what the race costs.

The phrase is in the book

In Book II, Julien reaches what he has wanted all his life. The marquis de La Mole gives in to the marriage with his daughter and gives him land, a noble name and a lieutenant's commission. Red at last: the uniform. And the novel measures the size of the victory at once:

"Hardly had he become a lieutenant, by favor, two days ago, when he was already calculating that to be commander in chief by thirty at the latest, like all the great generals, he had to be more than a lieutenant at twenty-three." (Stendhal, The Red and the Black, Book II, ch. 35, Penguin Companhia edition, translated by Raquel de Almeida Prado.)

The victory does not last two days. For someone who lives on campaign, nothing is enough. Then a letter comes. The marquis had asked Madame de Rênal for information about Julien, and her reply says:

"Poor and ambitious, it was with the help of the most consummate hypocrisy, and through the seduction of a weak and unhappy woman, that this man tried to attain a position and become somebody." (Book II, ch. 35.)

Notice who uses the expression. In the passage the class brings, it is in the letter, in the mouth of the one who accuses him. "Becoming somebody", there, is the name society gives to what Julien tried to do: to attain a position. And the letter is true enough to destroy him.

What he wanted: the image of the crown

What Julien wanted, at bottom, fits into one image. It is that of The Coronation of Napoleon, by Jacques-Louis David: a general born in Corsica crowning the empress Josephine before everyone. The Nous class says it carefully, in the first person: I imagine that, in Julien's head, this was an image he knew perfectly well. The novel does not claim that Julien saw the canvas. What the class does is use the painting as a portrait of desire: to be in that place, to have that crown. The details of the painting are in The Coronation of Napoleon: what David's painting shows.

And then the class asks the question that matters: what would he be with that crown?

Someone or something

Here an English phrase enters. Professor José Monir Nasser, who has given several classes on the classics and has one devoted to this novel alone, uses it to sum up Julien's situation: someone or something. Someone or a thing. The Nous class recommends noting it down, because this is one of the axes of the work. (The transcript of his class is automatic, so what appears here is a paraphrase, not a literal quotation.)

Look at how the phrase organizes the book. Julien is, throughout it, a succession of roles: the peasant who pretends to a vocation for the cassock, the tutor, the seminarian with a face of blind faith, the marquis's secretary, the chevalier de La Vernaye, the lieutenant. Each one is a thing he wears in order to rise. The other pole, someone, appears only in the intervals, when he forgets to pretend. It is in these terms that the class describes the cell: no longer a peasant pretending to be a priest, nor the secretary pretending to be a nobleman. The same class credits the professor with the lesson he draws from Don Quixote: our first obligation is to be who we are.

What he lost

The novel shows the cost of the race in small scenes. The first is the night in the garden, when Julien holds Madame de Rênal's hand under the linden tree. The young man who had spent the whole day calculating relaxes, and the narrator says:

"[...] he talked, forgot to pretend, and seemed a most agreeable man to the two friends who listened to him." (Book I, ch. 9.)

But in the same chapter he has to burn Napoleon's portrait so that no one will find out, and he thinks:

"[...] my reputation is my only good, it is for it alone that I live... And yet, what a life, my God!" (Book I, ch. 9.)

The second scene is the window. Before leaving for Paris, Julien buys a ladder from a peasant and, before dawn, climbs up to Madame de Rênal's room. She receives him, and the narrator notes what he had done that night:

"Had the return of tender feelings and the eclipse of Madame de Rênal's remorse come a little earlier, they would have been a divine happiness; obtained thus, by artifice, they were nothing more than a pleasure." (Book I, ch. 30.)

Divine happiness, before. Mere pleasure, after the artifice. It is the arithmetic of whoever comes in through the window, even into the room of someone who loves him.

The class closes this passage with an observation that leaves the book and reaches us. It happens to us as well: we are at a good dinner, in a good conversation, and part of us keeps thinking whether we are saying interesting things, whether we are making a good impression, whether people are enthusiastic. We go home without having taken anything away, because we were not present for the evening. It is Julien's campaign, on the scale of a dinner party.

When he was somebody

The novel's answer comes late, and it comes from the cell. Imprisoned, Julien loses his ambition at once. He no longer thinks of Paris, nor of Mathilde, nor of the uniform, only of the walks in the woods of Vergy. And he is puzzled by what he feels:

"Yet it is strange that I should have learned the art of enjoying life only after seeing its end draw near." (Book II, ch. 40.)

When Madame de Rênal comes to see him and the two forgive each other, he says: "Could we not spend two months together in a delightful way? Two months are many days. I shall never have been so happy." (Book II, ch. 43.) When Julien stops pretending, he no longer has any future to calculate.

The class keeps a second painting for this moment: Napoleon at Fontainebleau, by Paul Delaroche, from 1840. It is the same man as in the first picture, but seated, slouching, in dirty boots, in a room full of luxury, and the class asks: luxury for what? Julien carried the first image his whole life, the crowned man. And he ends like the second: seated in a cell, without a uniform that is worth anything, with nothing left to conquer. It is there, and only there, that he experiences happiness.

What the novel answers, and what it leaves

The Red and the Black neither condemns ambition nor absolves it. What it shows is a young man who believed in the promise of his time, that each person can make himself alone, and who fails despite all his talent and effort. His failure does not lie in the fall: it lies in having spent his whole life on campaign, without noticing that the happiness he had came in the hours when he stopped pretending.

So the question, the class suggests, may not be whether we should want to rise. Perhaps it is another: in the hours when everything is going well, are we there, or are we still keeping score? And what the class does not resolve, and the novel leaves to the reader, is whether it is possible to stop pretending before the cell, in the middle of life, with everything still at stake. To know the young man in full, start with Who was Julien Sorel? The young man who lived on campaign. The ending, with spoilers, is in The ending of The Red and the Black: happiness in the cell.

Continue: Who was Julien Sorel? The young man who lived on campaign · The Coronation of Napoleon: what David's painting shows · The ending of The Red and the Black: happiness in the cell · Where to start reading the pre-Socratics
Source class: O Vermelho e o Negro, de Stendhal